There was a day in high school that I realized I had a lifelong commitment to the forests, animals, soil, water, and air around me. I was taking Ecology in my senior year with one of my all-time best teachers, Cathy Abbott. She assigned some Aldo Leopold, the section where he describes the green fire in a wolf’s eyes. She also assigned Edward O. Wilson and numerous other writings (like Rachel Carson and Edward Abbey) that had such influence on me they may as well have changed my physical nature. And, neuro-biologically speaking, I guess they did. Of course, it was a lifelong lesson—the readings would never have taught me much if it had not been for what I had already learned: the love of my black lab Bo, the forests that provided me a protective canopy in my native Eugene, and my love for the rivers and the oceans (and all those animals I saw on the tele, the dolphins, the whales, the lions, the monkeys). In short, I was, from an early age, inundated with experiences that would eventually become my budding environmentalism.
Well something happened in college. I wouldn’t say that I became hardened to the cause, because that would be too harsh. But something happened to almost all of my likeminded friends as well. The re-“election” of our favorite politician may have iced the cake of what our younger selves would have called our cynicism. But that was only the icing. The cake had been baked and was ready for the icing. And my present self would say that I was just coming to terms with what’s real.
In high school I had made the mistake of believing that there can be the ideal reality; that there can be the good that completely overcomes the bad. I did not think it up in such a meager, simple form, but it was perhaps still produced somewhere in my mind’s landscape. Maybe it had something to do with living on top of a hill in rural Vermont. I don’t know. Then again, I don’t think I was quite that naïve, but I was certainly inspired by the literature that, for the most part, had not accounted for the new environmental crises (i.e. John Muir did not think much about global warming). For Muir it may have been a question of saving a certain amount of wilderness. It is obviously not that simple anymore.
In fact, “simple” is not a term that should ever be used to describe the environmental problems that we humans now face.
When I came to Japan I noticed, and noted on my web-log, that the Japanese were particularly good to the environment here. Upon some reflection and observation I must sadly take that statement back. Although the culture, and many of the practices, here in Japan are very friendly to the environment, much is done that utterly disregards the health of the land, air, and water. The hills are torn apart, the trucks spew out more black than America’s not-so-friendly semi-trucks, and burnable trash is burned (including paper and many plastics). People conserve here and use highly efficient appliances and cars, but there is much that is neglected as well. (It is still, in many ways, a few large paces ahead of America.) There is also the fact that most people I see here (excluding the farmers and hikers) would rather experience most of the world through the window of their cars rather than in person. Another way of saying it: nature, and the environment, have been fetishized, commodified. Puppies are cute, bugs are gross. There is little of the Muir-like reverence for trees in the popular culture here.
Not that I necessarily have a problem with this. I happen to like all forms of life here on earth (that do not involve suffering and injustice, of course). I like the cities, I like watching movies at home. I like being indoors and outdoors.
My question remains: how do we make things better? Is it just a coincidence that Ubuyama is having an unusually warm November and that the polar ice caps are melting at an alarming pace? Slowly, chaotically, steps can be taken in the right direction. It will be a mess, and we sure can’t stop our planet from going through its wild mood swings (some of which helped to bring us curious beings here).
Yi-Fu Tuan’s book Escapism (Johns Hopkins, 2000) provides an unusual, very personal depiction of ethical questions that relate to this issue. Much of the book reflects, in a confusing, yet refreshingly copious manner about the human desire to move to and away from the strange protection/stability of the modern culture and the wildness of its absence.
I have met three couples here in the town of Ubuyama that moved here from the city to get back to nature, two of which actually now farm all of their own food (with miniscule exceptions like actually buying salt). I had lunch with one of the couples on Saturday. They told me they moved to Aso (the name of this region and of the volcano in its center) because of the profundity of the land here. They picked Ubuyama in particular because it sits in between two massive volcanoes. At the right places in this town one can peer at Aso and then turn around and see Kuju, both with steaming volcanic tops. There is also extremely pure water in this town. (Probably for every year I am here it adds half a year on my potential life-span just because the water is so good.)
Tuan argues that to yearn to escape is a universal in human culture. We wish to escape from the chaos and helplessness of nomadic life and then we sometimes wish to escape back to it when things indoors start to feel a little too feelingless.
What I appreciate most about Tuan’s writing is that it implicitly produces a theory that confuses things that are good and bad. Some bad things are also good, some good things are also bad. They come in the simple pair, obviously—but they are confused and twisted together in a curious way.
So as a part of human culture eats away at its own life support and then other, smaller parts reach back again for the nourishments of the earth with kindly hands, I sit and watch doing a little of each.
In my green opinion it is those who can embrace imperfection that are capable of being happy human beings. Imperfection is the only perfection that life seems to offer. And curiously it is the quest for some kind of perfection that seems to lead the searchers of us all around in our silly searches for the right way.
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